Mary Fan has a review over at Jotwell of Margaret Hu’s new article, Biometric ID Cybersurveillance, 88 Indiana L.J.__ (forthcoming 2013). Mary Fan is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Washington who specializes in cross-border, U.S. and international criminal law and procedure. Margaret is a Duke Visiting Assistant Professor, who will be joining the Washington & Lee faculty in the fall (we’ll miss you, Margaret!). Her research interests include the intersection of immigration policy, national security, and civil rights, as well as critical legal studies. Margaret previously served as senior policy advisor for the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and also served as special policy counsel in the Office of Special Counsel for Immigration-Related Unfair Employment Practices (OSC), Civil Rights Division, U. S. Department of Justice, in Washington, D.C. She also has fabulous shoes, though I suspect that’s less relevant to most Lounge readers than it is to me.
From Fan’s review:
The dystopian world of “biometric ID cybersurveillance” that Margaret Hu envisions makes the old passports and smart agents seem old-fashioned. She catalogues the many ways the government is working toward expanding its “virtual cybersurveillance and dataveillance capacities.” She maps out emerging forms of “bureaucratized cybersurveillance” – more pervasive ways of technology-assisted identity verification and tracking. For example, instead of those stodgy information-limited modes of ID checks such as reviewing paper passports, alien identity papers, social security cards and driver’s licenses, she writes of biometric ID checks, digitalized IDs and other more information-laden methods of identification. Automated checks, database screening and biometric IDs may even “remove[] the matching process from the trained expertise of specific forensic experts,” leaving us at the mercy of glitchy and hard-to-contest hardware and software.
Read the whole thing over at Jotwell.
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